Myspace official page the day our myspace page that criticized Larry Flynt was removed.

Myspace has removed our therighttobeleftalone website and turned it over to Larry Flynt. So myspace will shrug their shoulders about getting rid of abusive stalkers, pornography and misogyny, rampant over there, but they sure managed to get our site off tout de suit. If you have linked to that site be sure to remove the link. We’ll post another url when we put it back up. Thanx.

I have found the writing of this article very hard. I have had to reassess my image of my past. I had to live in a household where the viewing of hard-core porn was the norm. This did me great damage. Part of the damage is that I have lost a great deal of my memory.

I get memories through my body. I can see my past in nightmares. I can remember when watching TV. Watching good acting forces back buried memories. I can feel fear – only it has no name. Then, I choose to be invisible. From the age of eight to twenty-seven I chose not to live.

I had lived with hard-porn from the time I was eight. Hustler entered my life when I was eleven. I found that it suffocated me with fear. Now, I wish to face Hustler in the eye, and to stand tall.

There was a time when I was a happy child. A time I thought that I was free. A time when the adults around me were trustworthy. There was a time when I could wander ’round naked. There was a time when I was a child. Nothing more — nothing less. I see that time as a dream. Sometimes, I stare at photos of me then. I wonder if any of it was true.

My stepdad enter my life when I was eight. He adored porn, the more violent the better. He came with images from sex-murders. Images of children doing things I didn’t want to know. He was a member of PIE [Paedophile Information Exchange, UK].

When he came, I changed. He made me look at the images. It burnt through my brain. When I closed my eyes, it rotted in my body. When Hustler came, I lost hope. All I knew was despair. All I saw was pain, only now it was with a smile. It made no sense. I got headaches. I lost my sight. I was closing down. All I heard was my stepdad’s laughter. He was laughing — as I shook with terror.

Then, I saw “Chester the Molester”. Then I knew I could not fight. In those cartoons, I saw my fate. I looked and I wanted to die. In those images, I saw my fear, my humiliation and my pain. Only, they were just a joke. I felt sick. I had forgotten how to laugh. I was learning to freeze my emotions.

Looking back, I see those cartoons for what they are. I had entered a world where children were property. They were always available for sex. They would never complain. Like the women in the hard-core porn, the children knew their place. They would learn to smile when in pain. When I saw “Chester the Molester” I was taught that sex was pain and fear. I learnt that it was inevitable I would be raped, beaten and threaten. For, after I learnt that the world belong to the rapist. I knew resistance was futile.

I survived by closing down my visual imagination. I thought it was a short-term solution, but it lasted for the rest of my life. Even when I relax I cannot escape into places that I have loved. Hard-core pornography has taken away my dreams.

My stepdad begun abusing me when I twelve. His abuse was gentle and calm. It was not as I had expected, it felt as if it was an accident. I thought that I was lucky since I was not dead or being tortured. I thought I had done something to make him touch me.

Hustler had taught how to be abused. I was now obeying my stepdad. I had stopped thinking that I could say no. As the abuse became more and more painful, as I became more and more degraded it all became clearer. I know the rules now.

Only, it made no sense. For, I could not understand why he keep saying that he loved me. How that be true, when he threw me into hell. Now, I see he spoke the language of hard-core porn. Always linking pain with pleasure. Speaking of how it was fine to have sex with kids. Telling me that it was only society’s conventions that say that it is wrong.

He made me believe that I received pain because I had moved. Every time he made me cum, he would say that I was a whore. I see now that I was his live porn.

When I was fourteen I had given up. I had decided that all I deserved was pain. I knew I was just a whore. I had been brainwashed by hard-core porn. I went blindly into the world of paid sex. At the time, I felt it was my decision — only I knew nothing.

I went towards men that used extreme sexual and physical violence. In that world, I found my place. The familiar place that I had seen in Hustler‘s photo-shoots. I thought I was hardened. I had forgotten that I was still a child. I thought I understood the rules of the game. But I was so wrong.

I did not know that each time that they hit me that I would go into shock. I did not know that each time that they raped me, I would feel pain. And I had no idea that men could hate women with such intensity. I thought I was street-wise. I was a child screaming to be rescued.

In their beds, I was an object. My eyes were dead. I had become just holes to be filled. Now, I had reached the beginning of my pain. Now, I was part of porn. I had no feelings left. My safety was not relevant.

Seeing me then, I can see the dead eyes in the Hustler‘s photo-shoots. I can understand that look. It is the look where hope is forgotten. For hope will only bring pain.

To believe in hope, will only mean facing the reality of the violence that i was living through. Then I may kill myself.

That time, was a different life to the one I live now. I know it is part of me, but I see it through a haze. My past made me strong and gave me a great deal of compassion. Now I feel some contentment for my life is low-key.

I was changed by having hard-core porn forced into my life. I can never regain the open trust I had before I was eight. I am still wary of my own sexuality. Hard-core porn placed an underlying depression in me. I still fight the desire to go back to violence when I am depressed. After all, violence was my norm. I am building a non-violent world around myself, but I find it very hard. For I cannot understand the rules of a safe life.

Each day, I am learning that I am more than a whore. I see now, that was never true. It was just the lies that hard-core porn placed in my brain. I live in the hope that one day, somehow, all women and children will be safe from the hated of hard-core porn.

What Larry Flynt was really doing the night
of the opening of Larry Flynt: The Right to Be Left Alone.

On Friday the 13th in April 2007 The Right To Be Left Alone, the latest documentary on Larry Flynt had its world premiere as the “center frame” film at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, sponsored by Duke University, The New York Times and HBO. Flynt was even invited as an honored guest, however his brother showed up instead, because Flynt said he was ill. At the opening, his brother said the reason Flynt was not present was not because he was sick. Maybe he was too busy satisfying his fetish for bondage pornography and not leaving women alone by violating their privacy in every way imaginable on his blog.

There were over 2,000 films entered in the Full Frame Festival, and apparently the Flynt documentary was among only one of two films that escaped the critical review process in an otherwise scholarly environment. Full Frame appears to have given Larry Flynt special protection where it could be assured that his critics were kept silent in order to protect Flynt from criticism. Free Speech, anyone?

Full Frame’s motto is “How much reality can you handle?”, but the filmmakers have produced a manipulative and superficial examination of Flynt, one that uses propaganda tactics and takes their audience for a ride. It is indeed a very unreal portrayal of Flynt which includes even “very little nudity” and hypocritically did not mention any of the massive amounts of racist, homophobic and misogynist materials he produced.

For decades Hustler, his hate magazine, has been on sale in almost every convenience store in the country. During that time, with each new issue every month he has declared war on women, feminists, people of color, animals, Jews, the disabled, children, and animal rights activists, as well as other groups or individual who disagreed with him. Flynt has aimed hate speech and harassment against every mistreated or oppressed groups you can think of. A full generation of males have now been raised on contempt like his and he loves it.

Dwayne Tinsley, close personal friend to Flynt, and the creator of the Hustler cartoon “Chester the Molester,” which depicted pre-teen girls of all races being molested, was convicted in 1990 of sexually abusing his daughter. When he was released from prison, after serving his time, Flynt hired him back on at Huster. In February 1996, Hustler publisher Joe Theron was arrested in Britain with 400 videos imported from South Africa, many of them depicting child pornography.

For all this Flynt is being promoted as a free speech hero instead of the greedy, exploitive, racist misogynist he really is. The right to be left alone? The right to be left alone? In his whole life Larry Flynt has never left anyone alone. Flynt has aimed hate speech and harassment against every oppressed groups you can think of. Big man. Big hero. Thanks Duke University, HBO, New York Times and Full Frame Documentary Festival!

Most people who have seen the Larry Flynt movie think they know who Larry Flynt is. A leading figure in the struggle for free speech, who published, according to our modern eyes, quite innocent nudie-photos and some jokes against the right wing conservatives and Jerry Falwell. Sounds cool but it’s a lie.

The real Flynt has little in common with the martyr that he finances people to describe him as. According to his own autobiography Flynt’s first sexual experience was raping a chicken. He killed the chicken to “avoid suspicion”. He has also gone to tremendous degrees in his attempts to silence his daughter from talking about how she was raped by him. He has used his power in the media to attempt to instill intimidation in any who spoke out against pornography. He used his magazine to vilify activist Aura Bogado with hateful, violent and threatening cartoons and articles. In his column called “Asshole of the Month” he has included Barack Obama, Diana Russell, Andrea Dworkin, Dorchen Liedholdt, Gloria Allred, Catharine MacKinnon and hundreds of others. In the 1970s he put out “Wanted Posters” for Gloria Steinem and Susan Brownmiller because they were antipornography. He has offered a bounty on feminists who have been critical against him and done whatever he could to silence whoever would be critical against the racist and misogynic material in his magazines.

The only free speech Larry Flynt really wants is his own and what he wants said, which makes him as much of a defender of free speech as say for example Stalin or Hitler.

When the media refers to Larry Flynt and his gubernatorial candidacy in California, they tend to mention his advocacy for freedom of the press, but they censor more important information regarding his assault on women and children. Flynt, a self-proclaimed champion of the First Amendment, is a description parroted by media sources uncritically. The legitimization of the publisher of Hustler magazine is alarming, but the distortions and omissions of mainstream media, while unfortunately not uncommon, are even more alarming. I’m not an expert at all on Flynt, and I intentionally limit my exposure to his publications because they are so brutally dehumanizing and degrading, but I can make a few general points why any socially responsible citizen would challenge Flynt’s candidacy for any office.

Since Larry Flynt began publishing Hustler in 1974, the intent of the naked female pictorials has been to bring the “accessible” girl-off-the-street to working class males. The depictions are less glossy, more explicit, gynecological, violent, and degrading than many of those featured in Playboy and Penthouse. These three euphemistically-termed men’s magazines are the three top-grossing in this genre.

Hustler targets juvenile consumers. In Reisman’s content analysis “An unforeseen finding may be the estimated 27 percent of Playboy, 33 percent of Penthouse, and 47 percent of Hustler cartoons and illustrations identified as ‘child magnets.’ Briefly child magnets are features which are generally unique to the children’s world of entertainment (e.g., books and television) and known to attract child readers/viewers. …Since evidence confirms the large juvenile readership of these magazines, the unique quality of Child Magnets may be viewed as a technique both catering to, and attracting a juvenile audience. Therefore the depictions presented in ‘Child Magnets’ may be presumed to be of special public interest and concern.” (Reisman, 1989)

Of these three magazines published between 1954 and 1984, Hustler had the most depictions of children in its cartoons and visuals. In Reisman’s content analysis there were 14 child images per issue or 12% of the total imagery. Hustler was also the magazine most likely to depict the children as nude or partially nude in its visuals. (Playboy had 8 images per magazine or 5% of the total imagery while Penthouse had 6 images per magazine or 4% – all unacceptable numbers!) (Reisman, 1994)

Dwaine Tinsley was a featured cartoonist in Hustler as well as the humor editor for many years. He wrote the “Chester the Molester” monthly cartoon feature until spring of 1989 when he was convicted on multiple accounts of child molestation. He had drugged his daughter, put her on birth control pills when she was 13 years old and sexually abused her until she was l8 years old. She described the cartoon series as depicting much of her experience as a sex abuse and incest victim. After two years in jail, Tinsley was released by an appeals court when it ruled that the prosecution should not have shown the molester cartoons to the jury and “inflamed the passions” of the jurors. What do the cartoons do to the vulnerable juvenile and adult consumers of the magazine? Tinsley returned as an employee of Hustler magazine after his release from prison.

One of Larry Flynt’s daughters, Tonya, accused her father of child sexual abuse. She wrote a book about her experiences and her concerns about pornography. Flynt denied the charges and viciously attacked her in the media, a strategy more common among perpetrators. Another daughter did not support the charges by Tonya, and she reportedly was not disinherited as was Tonya

Larry Flynt is best known for publishing Hustler magazine, but his company, LFP, Inc. puts out about 29 other magazines. He is responsible for Barely Legal, the very popular magazine and video series. The magazine features naked and pornographic pictorials of female models, who are usually described as having just celebrated their 18th birthday.
They more commonly look 12 to 14 years old, and wear pigtails, hair bows, saddle shoes, and younger childish clothing and props. The text usually describes them as “sluts,” etc., with years of sexual activity by the girls or they are virgins who urgently need their condition remedied. This is newsstand pseudo-child pornography. Thsi is a technique to circumvent the letter of the law, while breaking the essence of the law to protect underage youth.

There is a Hustler make-up and accessories line targeted to adolescent girls. More information on these branded products and their marketing is needed..

Big Brother magazine is published by Flynt and is targeted to adolescent and younger skateboarders. The covers are often child magnets and not explicit. Dave Carnie, the editor in 1999 admitted the magazine covers are intentionally deceptive so parents won’t suspect the content, and children can be deceived into purchasing a magazine with a pornographic mindset There are no typical pornography photos, but the raunchy sex talk, etc., is embedded in the text. Interviews with 14 year old boys include questions like, “would you f**k your mother to be as good as so and so skateboarder?” Tips for girls for attention at parties include to “show their boobies,” and to find one, two or three other girls to engage in pseudo-lesbian activities while drinking alcohol, etc. When asked why there was no parental discretion warning labels the editor stated that Flynt wouldn’t allow it because it may affect circulation numbers. (Pettineo, 1999)

Gail Dines addresses the racist content in Hustler magazine. Black males are portrayed in the cartoons and visuals as violent and dangerous, and sexual monsters with oversized penises raping white women. This chapter may be accessed at:

A disturbing reference to Hustler occurred in A & F Quarterly, Spring, 2002. This catalog and lifestyle magazine combination targets adolescents while promoting their Abercrombie & Fitch casual clothing line popular with preadolescents and early adolescents anxious to be like cool college kids. Scattered throughout the sexually explicit publication are interviews with various celebrities popular with youth. The following includes a portion of an interview with MC Paul Barman, a hip-hop performer:

“…I’d like to predict a fashion. …Okay. Have you seen Playboy T-shirts around? When a girl wore a Playboy shirt when I was a teenager, it was the hottest thing ever. Now, you know how it is ultimately, whatever is amazing becomes preppie. They sell ‘em in a mall. However, anytime you have something trendy, a branch of it, which is a little bit more obscure and has a little bit more flavor, is the new cool thing. So I once saw a cute girl wearing a Hustler shirt, and I once saw a cute girl wearing a Barely Legal shirt. I’ve seen one of each. And I’m telling you, there are going to be a lot more of them. If we started a company bootlegging T-shirts with the logos for Hustler, Barely Legal, High Society-Black Tail, I think, would be huge-this is how you make money. Twenty-five dollars, plus shipping and handling, on porno****.com. Have you ever seen a flat-chested girl who looks like the stepdaughter of a business executive wearing a shirt that says “PORN STAR’? These chicks are not porn stars. They probably don’t even go down. But they will wear a Nugget T-shirt. And I want to be the person that sells it to them.” (Collins, 2002)

Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler and numerous other pornography magazines, has finally honored my decades of anti-pornography activism by naming me “Asshole of the Month” in Hustler, February 20051. Several other feminists have achieved this accolade, including Andrea Dworkin, Dorchen Liedholdt, Gloria Allred and Catharine MacKinnon. Gloria Steinem appeared on a “Most Wanted” poster in Hustler accompanied by Flynt’s accusation that she “should be considered armed with false propaganda and dangerous to the rights of all Americans” for her anti-pornography views.

In every issue of Hustler, Flynt names one of his enemies “Asshole of the Month.” Along with a photograph of his adversary’s face emerging from a donkey’s rectum2, Flynt provides three quarters of a page of crude, mostly defamatory, text. I believe Flynt may have finally decided to target me in this way because he seems to have been particularly riled by two public statements that I made, i.e., “I wish that Flynt’s would-be murderer had been a better shot,” and, “I wish Larry Flynt had never survived his mother’s womb.” One or both of these pronouncements are referred to in three articles in the February issue of Hustler. Missing from two of them, however, is my rationale for making these inflammatory assertions, i.e., that Flynt’s many pornographic enterprises that have made him perhaps the most notorious pornographer in the world today, have been responsible for an immeasurable amount of sexual violence against women and girls. Had Flynt been aborted or miscarried by his mother or murdered in 1978, a great deal of suffering would have been avoided.

Following are a few examples of Flynt’s slanderous statements about me in the “Asshole” article in which he describes me as “a bitter shrew”:

“So poisonous is Russell’s vile rhetoric that it begs the question: Where did this Ms. Pol Pot come from? …

“By the end of the turbulent decade [the 1960s], Russell was teaching at California’s Mills College, helping build its women’s-studies department — an accomplishment akin to Joseph Goebbels launching a communications department at Berlin University.

“Russell’s personal history of relationships with men seems shrouded at best, although the educator has made passing references to a brief marriage that she bemoans as a ‘crash course in sexism.’ This is likely code for ‘Hubby wanted a hummer when he got home from work,’ which to Russell is the moral equivalent of Dachau’s ovens.” ….

“Diana Russell is a sick and dangerous woman, one who peddles her diseased philosophy of men-hating as a template for resistance to the Patriarchy.”3.

This hyperbolic vitriol reveals how threatened Flynt is feeling — a sentiment he cops to in his editorial titled, “The Feminist Threat.” This phrase is also on this issue of Hustler’s cover under a logo stating “HUSTLER GOES TO WAR.” Implicit is the fact that Flynt’s war is against anti-pornography feminists. He has singled out Aura Bogado, a producer and anchor of KPFK Radio News in Los Angeles, and me as his targets in this particular month. Following are excerpts from Flynt’s editorial:

“Recent events have caused me to once again focus attention on my lifelong opponents on the feminist fringe, those who — however they cloak their rhetoric — are antisex, antiporn and antimale. For too long I have tended to dismiss them on the grounds that they do not represent the majority of the women in this country. However, I can now see that, while this is true, these women have been making inroads into positions of power, especially within those institutions generally recognized as being on the Progressive Left….

“… (M)ilitant feminists seem intent on instituting a new fascism based on their notions of what is right and what is wrong …. This is a particular shame because the fringe feminists’ vicious attacks against healthy male sexuality tend to drive most men out of the Progressive tent….

“Given the foregoing, I have instructed my editors to take an in-depth look at the women of the Left — the good, the bad and the ugly. In this issue our extensive overview includes a look at recent attacks against HUSTLER from the militant feminists,… and a follow-up article about a California women’s college with a troubling agenda [Mills College].

“It is our hope and intention that by putting the spotlight on these militant feminists — who got away with their vile attacks only because the voices of reason are afraid to stand up to them — we will reveal their bankrupt ideology.”4

Similarly slanderous statements are made about me and Bogado in Amy Alkon’s article in the same issue of Hustler. Flynt drafted this foul-mouthed lackey, “a syndicated columnist who has appeared in more than 100 newspapers throughout North America”5, into his war against anti-pornography feminists. She focuses her venom on Bogado and me, referring to us as “Femi-Fascists”. “As a free-expression absolutist,” she writes,

“I even defend the rights of hate-spewing, jack-booted Femi-Fascists like Aura Bogado and Diana Russell. In fact, I encourage them to speak openly and frequently, if only so their philosophy can be exposed as a fraud, as a lie, as a wrongheaded, nasty-ass steaming pile of Stalinist shit.“6

Quoting my statement about wishing that Flynt’s would-be murderer had been a better shot, Alkon accuses me of just stopping short “of putting out a feminist fatwa against Flynt”7. She then proceeds to quote me as accusing Flynt, “through his publications, of ‘causing thousands of rapes, thousands of cases of child sexual victimization, millions of cases of sexual harassment and, very likely, many cases of torturing women and some murders of women.'” Alkon declares my estimates of the suffering perpetrated by Flynt to be “sick, unsubstantiated and unjustifiable allegations”8. In contrast, she quotes Catherine Salmon approvingly for saying that “Pornography is about sex, and not about violence or the degradation of women”9.

Despite Alkon’s arrogance, I’ll wager that she knows next to nothing about research on pornography, whereas I have been studying this form of misogynist oppression of women for over 30 years and I’ve written three books on the subject. Nevertheless, Alkon feels entitled to endorse the validity of Salmon’s conclusion that pornography has nothing to do with violence and is not degrading, while she dismisses as “Stalinist shit” my views that the women involved in its production are degraded, that the portrayals of women in pornography are degrading, and that pornography plays a significant role in causing sexual violence and abuse. [Footnote: This does not mean that pornography is the only cause of harm to women.] Perhaps this is not surprising given that Alkon [and Susie Bright] was hired to wage war against Bogado and I, not to seek the truth about the harmful effects of pornography.10

The picture illustrating Alkon’s article shows a bald tough-looking woman dressed in what appears to be a Nazi uniform with a lesbian symbol on her armband. Standing upright on a rock with a riding crop in one hand, she looks like a giant dominating a large army of docile-looking men all of whom wear armbands displaying a male symbol, and all with their hands chained together. Presumably the intimidating-looking lesbian is supposed to represent Bogado and/or me.

An unflattering photograph of me appears in a third article in the February issue of Hustler titled “Smear & Loathing at Mills College.” This same photograph of my face was used for the “Asshole” picture)

I was a professor of sociology at this private all-women’s liberal arts college in Oakland, California, for 22 years. The caption to the photograph of me reads, “Teaching and Preaching Hatred: Mills Professor Emerita Diana Russell boasts of her desire to see Larry Flynt murdered.” In the text, journalist author Thayer Walker repeats my two now oft-quoted statements about my wishing Flynt’s murderer were a better shot, and that he had never survived his mother’s womb. The context of these quotations was Walker’s claim that the few male students at Mills had experienced considerable anti-male sentiment from female students. In addition, Walker documented some of the many angry and threatening statements made by students following the publication in Hustler11 of a scandalous and salacious article by Sam Ospovat, a former male graduate student at Mills, about a Fetish Ball he had attended on the campus in 2002. My participation in this fracas was to write a harsh criticism of the Fetish Balls as “pornographied” events where pornography was shown and many of the students were partially naked and/or dressed like sluts). I also castigated the President of Mills for allowing such events on the Mills campus12.

I believe Flynt was also enraged by my participation in a protest at the official opening of his new Hustler Club in the sleezy red-light district of San Francisco on February 20, 2002. Indeed, this is where I told reporters that I wished that Flynt’s would-be murderer had been a better shot. It is virtually certain that Flynt was aware of my presence that evening because a photograph of me behind a very large protest sign appears in an article about the opening of the Hustler Club.13

Not only was I protesting with other members of Women Against Pornography because we opposed the opening of Flynt’s new topless dancing club; we were also there to express our outrage over the blatant child pornography advertisement that was published in local newspapers and used to lure men to the opening of the Hustler Club14. Although spokesmen for the club maintained that the girls — who looked no older than 14 — were of legal age, the young women were obviously chosen to appeal to men who are turned on by underage girls. In addition to the sign showing a giant enlargement of this ad that we used for our protest, we displayed another equally large sign that read “HUSTLER CLUB: FOR MEN WHO NEED CHILD PORN & ABUSE TO GET IT UP!” Pictures of two flaccid penises appear on this sign.

The second sign so enraged a man hanging around the entrance to the Hustler Club that he assaulted me while attempting to destroy the sign I stood behind. He failed to achieve his goal (the sign was made of vinyl), but succeeded in wrestling me to the ground. It took three male bystanders to break my assailant’s ferocious grip on me. Although I could have orchestrated his arrest had I thought fast enough before he hurriedly left the scene, I was appalled that none of the three journalists who quoted me in their coverage of this event saw fit to mention this assault. I guess they consider violence against women too trivial to warrant mentioning. Additionally, the fact that those of us from Women Against Pornography were the only ones to protest the use of what looked like child pornography to advertize the opening of the Hustler Club suggests that the use of increasingly young — and young-looking — girls is becoming more acceptable to the public. This is precisely the way pornography succeeds in transforming what used to be confined to pornography into mainstream images.

We need to mobilize increasing numbers of feminists to fight against pornography. The formation of a new organization tentatively called the National Feminist Anti-Pornography Movement in Boston in July 2005, is a promising sign15. This article shows how being attacked by our enemies is a sign that we are making progress in our struggle against the pornography warmongers who want to silence us.